First edition of Woolf’s The Waves, in a variant binding, usually found in purple cloth. This copy formerly in the possession of Cyril Connolly, with his pencil and ink annotations to the front flyleaves. Two of the annotations are the same, reading “The Waves is a poetic account of people seen through each others minds through all their lives, speaking their thoughts in poetic imagery to each other”. The third annotation praises the book for its celebration of “the dignity of human life and the passage of time. It is one of the books which comes nearest to stating the mystery of life and so, in a sense, nearest to solving it". Connolly’s signature and 1938 date is found beneath.

Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was an English literary critic and editor of the hugely successful magazine Horizon, which over the course of its printing history ran for 120 issues. The intention of the magazine was to celebrate the emergence of distinguished writers during and after the Second World War, and for “keeping them in touch with their French and American contemporaries—in short, continuing our policy of publishing the best critical and creative writing we can find in wartime England and maintaining the continuity of the present with the past.” Along with Woolf, the magazine published a huge number of writers, including such names as Nancy Cunard, W. H. Auden, Nancy Mitford, T. S. Eliot, Barbara Hepworth, H. G. Wells, Vita Sackville-West, and numerous others.

Initially, Connolly and Woolf had taken an instant dislike to each other. In a 1956 letter from V. S. Pritchett, the writer recalls Connolly as saying “I disliked her. She asked embarrassing questions”. The feelings were certainly reciprocated. In her diaries, Woolf wrote of the ‘baboon’: “'I do not like that smarty-boots Connolly." Their mutual opinions of one another, however, did not prevent them from appreciating the other’s work, and this copy is a personal documentation of how considerate he was of its import.

Widely regarded as Woolf’s most experimental work, the novel follows six narrators through their lives, interweaving their respective stories through a series of monologues from childhood to adulthood. Each character bears resemblance to Woolf’s real-life friends and acquaintances, with inspirations taken from such characters as E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, Mary Hutchinson and Vanessa Bell, as well as Woolf herself, and her brother Thoby Stephen.

Upon her death in 1941, the final words of ‘The Waves’ were engraved on the author’s tombstone: “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! The Waves broke on the shore. ”

8vo., blue cloth boards, overlaid with paste paper to front and rear covers (we found a green variant of the paper on a Sylvia Townsend Warner title published by Chatto & Windus); lettered in gilt to backstrip; pp. [iv], 5-324, [iv]; boards rather rubbed, particularly at edges, with cloth corners showing through to boards; pushed at spine tips and corners, with some loss of colour to the cloth and paste paper to the edges of boards; slight shelf lean; internally a little spotted, sporadically throughout, but predominantly to the prelims and endpapers; a bit loved, but still a good to very good copy.